I absolutely loved how they depicted las vegas / sin city , I also felt there was a feel of Judge Dread / Mad Max / Totall Recall atmosphere which was cool
shareI was surprised they kept all that lame leather S&M stuff. It looks massively dated and forced in the original series and just so out of place in this one.
share> I absolutely loved how they depicted las vegas / sin city
It is fun to watch, but ultimately I can't agree. I like the original novel but also think it has some grave flaws. One is that it utterly failed to explore this question -- why would sane, decent people choose to align themselves with evil? If you're gonna have a titanic battle of good versus evil, that's a question that has to be addressed, I think. The novel did depict a number of characters who arguably could have ended up in Boulder instead of Vegas; e.g., Jenny Engstrom, Angie Hirschfeld, Carl Hough, Barry Dorgan. At one point Dayna wondered what the hell Jenny was doing in Vegas at all. Good question. But King almost entirely avoided that issue, and when he hinted at it his explanations were overly simplistic to the point of being adolescent.
When I saw that they were changing things for this miniseries I hoped they might do a better job hitting this question than the book did. In the original story Vegas is an orderly place, the power's back on, et cetera, and we can at least speculate that might appeal to some characters. But this version's Vegas is a place only a lunatic would want to go to.
Not sure what your objection is. Are you doubting that lunatics wouldn't flock together, and wind up in one central place? Just as the decent folk congregate, and establish a home?
(I might've agreed w/you at one time. . .but this past year has taught me to NEVER AGAIN underestimate the reality of large groups of stupid people finding each other, and marching in lockstep. . .)
I don't doubt that lunatics would flock together, but under normal circumstances they wouldn't gather into one group. There would be many such groups, some hostile to each other. Also many groups of decent people with some hostilities. But these aren't normal circumstances, there are the two big magnets pulling people to converge into two groups.
What's impossible is to build a society entirely or mostly of wackos. Yet that's what Vegas seems to be. There has to be a large number of stable, reasonably bright, responsible people to keep a society's wheels turning. And we've seen one or two -- e.g., the clerk who wanted to put Tom in the slave pool. But why did she join a society where there's slavery, and gladiatorial combat to the death as entertainment? Why would any remotely normal person join such a place?
In the book, Vegas had its power on, a rudimentary phone system, etc. Lloyd was proud that they had school going for the kids. Most of the people were normal, at least fairly decent, and some of those seemed happy there. There were also a few who tried Boulder, didn't like it, and went to Vegas. Why did all those normal people go to Flagg?
With the original story you could ask that question, although King never answered it. With this version the question is nonsensical.
More generally, so much has been changed that this is a quite different story than the original. Fine, but why give it the same title? Why give the characters the same names? When Bernstein et al moved Romeo and Juliet into a world of 1950s street gangs they didn't pretend they were telling the same tale, but I daresay West Side Story resembles its inspiration more than this miniseries resembles the book.
2 I have brought this issue up in the Facebook Stand group that I'm in. OTOH, the question was posed in the FB Stand group, as to why not just read the book again if you want the exact same story on film?
It's a fair question, I think.
More generally, so much has been changed that this is a quite different story than the original. Fine, but why give it the same title? Why give the characters the same names? When Bernstein et al moved Romeo and Juliet into a world of 1950s street gangs they didn't pretend they were telling the same tale, but I daresay West Side Story resembles its inspiration more than this miniseries resembles the book.share
> why not just read the book again if you want the exact same story on film?
By the logic of that position, once you've read the book why see the film at all? My response would be that it's not the exact same story. One is verbal, the other is audiovisual. The greatest writer ever could not create a description of a pie in the face that would be as funny as seeing it happen. OTOH, adapting a story from print to film means losing much of the characters' inner thoughts, e.g., Trashy's sometimes hilarious ravings.
Retelling The Stand in the present inevitably means changing it, just because it's moved 40 years forward from its original setting. There are parts of the novel which have a 1960s/hippie feel -- no surprise, that's King's generation. That worked well enough for a 1970s audience but wouldn't fly today. As someone opined somewhere on these boards, "Captain Trips" was already dated when the original book was published.
But I think it would be quite possible to modernize The Stand while being true to the characters, themes, et cetera. I guess that's where I draw the line at. When a remake changes those things it's no longer a remake, it's a flat out revision. Another example of this sort of thing was Peacock TV's retelling of Brave New World a few months ago. Did you see that? It's even further from its source material than this miniseries is. I wonder if this revising is going to be a trend rather than a few isolated cases.
On another note, there are several writers on this project other than King, and I wonder how much of this miniseries comes from SK at all. At the extreme, it's hypothetically possible that others paid him a bundle to allow them to do whatever they wanted with The Stand and his credit is only titular. I doubt that very much, I suspect The Stand means too much to SK for him to consent to that. But the "Mad Max" vibe doesn't seem at all like King to me.